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Nissan is Getting Sued Over the BladeGlider Concept

Stirling Matheson is an automotive writer, reviewer, and spewer of sarcasm of Indianapolis, IN. When not playing with cool cars, he is working as the Artistic Director of Ballet Theatre of Indiana. Hear his pseudo-sane quips on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.

Dec 02, 2013

Image via Nissan

When Nissan unveiled the BladeGlider, everybody immediately thought "it's a road-going Deltawing," because it was clearly a road-going version of the very pointy race car that used to be Nissan-powered. Now the owner of Delta Wing Technologies, Don Panoz, is calling the concept a clear rip-off, and has filed suit against Nissan, Ben Bowlby, a former Deltawing team member who now works for Nissan and was on the BladeGlider team, and Darren Cox, the global director of Nissan motorsports.

Nissan, on the other hand, claims that the car was inspired by "the soaring, silent, panoramic freedom of a glider and the triangular shape of a high-performance 'swept wing' aircraft." What does a bull do a few hours after it eats?

Delta Wing Technologies has been working on two road-going designs, a two seat exotic supercar and a high performance sport sedan, based on the Deltawing and it hopes to license them to automakers for production. Needless to say, this means there's a lot on the line with this lawsuit. If Delta Wing Technologies is successful in court, Nissan will be barred from selling, showing, or racing cars with such a design.